all for tank commander ...

as you know, artillery is one of the most heated debate subjects, when it comes to World of Tanks. Some hate it, some love it, but one thing is for certain, no matter what you think or how angry you might get.

Artillery is here to stay. It won’t be ever removed and I am really glad it won’t.

But, with that being said, nobody’s saying there’s no room for improvement or change. Generally, I consider the artillery in World of Tanks relatively functional, expecially with the latest Battle Assistant mod, that makes it MUCH more fun to play – not giving you an insane advantage, but rather giving you improved situational awareness.

Anyway, some people recently asked me “how would you make arty better for everyone?” – okay, here’s my idea what I would do. This would also be applicable to Armored Warfare, as it seems they basically cloned the artillery mechanism for now (however, it was already stated it would be reworked for artillery to work as “AoE damage”).

Proposal

Starting point: current WoT artillery state

I would take following steps:

– point of view (“satellite” mode) would be reworked from the current system to the system used by the Battle Assistant mod. I am sure everyone knows what I am talking about. – minimum-size aim circles (max aim) would be roughly 75 percent of current maximum size (no precise targetting with long aim times), with maximum size increased by 25-50 percent, with faster aim times (comparable to current heavy guns, eg. 3-4 seconds) – alpha would be reduced to current largest TD guns (for example, for the 240mm gun on T92, alpha would drop from 2250 to – say – 700-800, with smaller guns nerfed the same way), ROF would be buffed however to keep effective DPM viable (I’ll get to that).

Now, the big change. Each artillery HE shell would get a massive buff of splash – the splash area would cover over half the size of the maximally aimed aim circle area for that respective gun.

Each target within the splash area would be hit for (full damage – (armor*X)), where armor is the armor counted for the splash purposes (as it is now), while X is a balancing coefficient, based on testing, that would keep the DPM in reasonable limits, could also be removed and replaced by lower alpha.

Otherwise, no saves allowed, spaced armor is ignored (to prevent “eating of shells” – if you are in splash, you get damaged, end of story). The biggest change – artillery HE shells ignore both inner and outer modules completely, eg. artillery shell hits a wide area, but it cannot detrack you, ammorack you, destroy your gun or kill your crew. Additionally, vehicle top (roof, deck) armor would have a special anti-arty coefficient (basically it would for example count as if the thickness of the top armor is (X (nominal) + Y), where Y is depending on the tier and class of the vehicle). Open-topped vehicles would still get massive damage if hit directly, but mediums and heavies would take far less damage even from random direct shots. The impact distribution within the circle (given the massive splash) would also be much more randomized, so splash would be the primary damage-dealing mechanism.

This massive splash damage would be used to break “standoffs” without the frustration of arty chain detrack and annoying oneshots.

To offset this steady DPM by artillery, after certain amount of shots (two, three, four depending on that particular gun) every enemy team player would have 4 adjacent squares on the minimap light up red, indicating where enemy artillery likely is (possibly with verbal warning like “enemy artillery detected”). If more shots were fired from the same area, the artillery would become instantly spotted for X seconds (let’s say 15-20). Additionally, artillery would be vulnerable to enemy artillery shells, meaning splash from HE would hit it harder than regular shells, possibly even oneshotting it. This would mean that artillery HAS to move after firing a few shots and the DPM would have to be balanced taking this into account. One more thing, light tanks would get a special anti-artillery saving throw. If the light tank is moving at higher speed (specifically, at least one half of its nominal speed), it gets 70 percent chance to completely ignore splash damage. This would prevent the large splash abuse to “hunt” scouts.

This mechanism would also allow the implementation of mass rocket launchers, as instead of one large shell with massive splash, you’d get series of small rocket impacts (smaller splash), covering cca 70 percent of the area within (let’s say) 2-3 seconds. They would be also accompanied by a loud sound effect warning of the impact (the shriek of rockets or something a second or two in advance), possibly also with higher chance of detection (minimap “lighting up” after one salvo for example).

Well, that’s it. Thoughts?

Edit: Teamdamage issue? It’s probably not that hard to disable team damage for artillery or to add a teamdamage condition that would give more punishment to players who damage more than one friendly vehicle with one shell (which is pretty much exclusive to artillery).